With election-related mail piling into their mailboxes and some of Nevada’s races ranked as the most competitive in the country, students in a special election newsroom pop up class at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, are setting the framework for an exciting semester.

In this new social media ecosystem, we can all be media players.  Students are being tasked with establishing a new web infrastructure and coming up with innovative ways to tell stories which will inform and educate, from podcasting to interactive data visualization, Twitter polls to Instagram videos.

Students will come up with an evolving human voter guide for Reno voters which will include hashtags being used surrounding the current election cycle.

Stories being pursued include an investigation of other election-focused Nevada websites, looking into a new group of self-proclaimed Socialists on campus, confusing ballot questions, young Nevada political volunteers lost in a sea of grey and border-hopping Californians, how strip clubs, the #metoo movement and local elections collide in Reno, the effect of midterms on local gaming boards, and plenty more.

Stories will also be possibly reversioned to run on professional media outlets such as the local NPR affiliate KUNR and the alt-weekly, the Reno News and Review.

Reporting fittingly kicked off on September 25th, National Voter Registration Day, and will continue through election night and into December, analyzing results from this crucial midterm election.

This pop up election newsroom class initiative is part of the Reynolds Media Lab at the Reynolds School, a production center which aims for cutting edge and innovative student journalism output.  

More details can be found on its website www.reynoldsmedialab.com and its affiliated social media channels.  The hashtag the pop up newsroom will be driving is #nevadavote, so look for that on your own Medium, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram pages.

This post was written by Nico Colombant, a community documentarian and journalism instructor at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno.